“Ramping up?” DeLuca said.
“He was a student of World War I. And II. He said the thing about world wars was that everybody could see them coming, for years, and nobody could stop them.”
“So he saw one coming, and the only way to stop it was to disappear?” DeLuca said. “That sounds pretty self-dramatizing, if you ask me.”
She nodded.
“If you want my opinion, I think he’d been working for years on a particular problem, his team was, and then he solved it. But I don’t think he told anybody. I think he saw where it was going to lead and then he kept the solution to himself.”
“Maybe those were the files Cheryl Escavedo had,” DeLuca said. “Do you think that’s possible?”
Penelope Burgess shrugged.
“He didn’t keep the important stuff in his computer,” she said. “He would have kept it all in his head. He had a tendency to internalize things. I know after he left, some of the people who’d worked for him tried to carry on without him, and they couldn’t, and they probably could have if there had been anything in his files they could use. He knew the Army wasn’t going to let him delete anything, so I’m guessing he never wrote down whatever it was he learned. That’s not to say other people wouldn’t have figured it out. I think he just thought that if he left, he could set his program back a few years, probably not that he could kill it altogether.”
“So you have no idea where he is?”
She reached behind her and took down a postcard that had been held to her bulletin board with a thumbtack. On one side was a picture of a twelve-foot-tall fiberglass kachina doll outside a convenience store, with the words WELCOME TO CHLORIDE, NEW MEXICO in yellow. On the reverse side, handwritten, were the words: “There’s only 10 kinds of people in this world, and I’m not going to be either. Be good. Gary.” It was postmarked from Chloride, New Mexico, October 12, 2001.
“That’s all I’ve gotten from him,” she said, “about a week after he left. He could be anywhere, really. Though it’s hard to picture him sitting on a beach in the Caribbean, sipping piña coladas.”
“I don’t get it,” DeLuca said, reading the card.
“It’s an old math joke. There are only 10 kinds of people in this world, those who understand base two and those who don’t. A one and a zero is how the number two is described in base two.”
“Good one,” DeLuca said. “Do you think Space Command would have let him walk away from his job like that?”
“You tell me,” she said. “Do you think they would have?”
“Not unless he had something to use for leverage,” DeLuca said. “He’s the friend you said you knew who’d worked at Cheyenne?”
She nodded.
“Do you think he might have met Cheryl Escavedo there?”
Again she shrugged.
“It’s possible,” she said. “Though if you’re thinking they might have been having an affair, I suppose that’s also possible, but Gary was never a very sexual person. At least not with me. Are you married, Mr. DeLuca?”
“I am,” he said.
“Then I imagine in your line of work, you probably understand the sort of toll it takes when you can’t talk to your spouse about what you do.”
“More than I wish I did,” DeLuca said. “I suspect your reasons for speaking out against space defense are more than just the personal.”
“Don’t get me started,” she said.
“I am interested,” he said. “But if you don’t want to go there, that’s all right, too.”
“Where do I begin?” she said. “I’ve heard somebody say if we took a mere 1 percent of the DOD space budget and put it into teaching history, we’d eventually be smart enough to avoid war and not have to spend the other 99 percent on weapons. I do understand the strategic advantages of weapons in space, but it seems like the people at Space Command find them so appealing that they ignore the disadvantages. Suppose you blind an enemy by taking out all his satellites and communication—do you think he’s going to sit back and wait for what comes next, or is he going to come at you with everything he has while he still can? Not to mention that if we take war into space, we could so easily make space unusable—they told you at Cheyenne they’re tracking seventy-five hundred objects, didn’t they? Bigger than a baseball. There’s another hundred thousand smaller than a baseball but big enough to take out the space shuttle. These things are traveling at twenty-seven thousand miles an hour, ten times faster than a high-powered rifle bullet. A marble at that speed has the impact of a one-ton safe dropped off a three-story building. A BB has the impact of a bowling ball hitting you at one hundred miles an hour. My friend Sally Ride told me after her last Space Shuttle mission, they found one of the windows was pitted by a paint fleck—a paint fleck was almost enough to knock them out of the sky. You watch all these science-fiction movies where they blow something up in space and poof, there’s a ball of fire and the whole thing disappears and leaves a big empty void behind—that’s not the way it actually works, if you think about it. Blow up one satellite and you have another 100,000 fragments. One of those hits another satellite or one of the 3,000 discarded rocket boosters out there, and you have another 100,000 fragments. And don’t think space is so big that it couldn’t happen, because we tend to orbit our satellites in altitude bands. Some are out there at 25,000 kilometers, some are at 7,000, some at 700, most are at 900 to 1,000 and the 1,500- to 1,700-kilometer range, and there are more going up all the time, ever since we abrogated the 1972 ABM Treaty in June 2002—the chances of initiating a cascading chain reaction billiard ball sort of effect have gone up. If that happens, no more Hubble Telescope, no more International Space Station, no Cosmic Background Explorer…”
“And no Mars program?”
“If you think I’m only thinking of my own self-interest, you couldn’t be more wrong,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you’re not—I regret the implication.”
“And then someday it starts to fall back to earth, hardened uranium, plutonium for satellites powered by nuclear reactors—it boggles the mind.”
“It boggled Gary’s, I gather,” DeLuca said.
“I told you not to get me started,” she said. “The hardest part is that nobody can see what’s going on out there, so Space Command and STRATCOM and everybody else is free to do as they please, with unlimited black budgets and all the best intentions, I suppose, and it’s all kicked into overdrive since 9/11. That’s what Gary meant by ‘the handwriting’s on the wall.’ Sometimes I get angry because he didn’t take me with him.”
“Would you have wanted to go with him?” DeLuca asked.
“No,” she said, giving it some thought. “I don’t think so. I’ve never been able to put my head in the sand. What do you think? Do you think I’m a pessimist? Do you think the glass is half full or half empty?”
“I think the glass is twice as big as it used to be,” DeLuca said. “I appreciate your talking to me, but I know you have papers to grade.” He rose to his feet. “Do you know a guy named Josh Truitt, by any chance? Photographer?”
“I’ve seen his pictures, but I don’t think I’ve ever caved with him,” she said. “Why?”
“Just curious,” DeLuca said. “When I talk to people, sometimes the most useful question I can ask is if they know each other. How about somebody named Brother Antonionus?”
“The Star Trek guy?” she said. “Brethren of the Light?”
“I don’t know anything about him,” DeLuca said. “His voice was on Cheryl Escavedo’s answering machine. What are the ‘Brethren of the Light’?”
“They’re waiting for somebody in a space ship to come pick them up and carry them away,” she said. “And no, I’ve never met him, but they’re in the local newspaper every once in a while because their headquarters are in Albuquerque.”
“I hope I get there before the space ship comes,” DeLuca said.
“Be careful,” she told him, walking him to the door. “I hear
he’s mighty darn persuasive at getting people to join his cult.”
“I’m already a Red Sox fan,” DeLuca said. “That’s enough of a cult for one person.”
The walled compound occupied by the Brethren of the Light was in the foothills east of town, in an exclusive neighborhood of gated compounds and long driveways. He’d been told, by whoever had answered the phone when he called, that he wouldn’t need an appointment but that no one could guarantee when Brother Antonionus was going to be receptive. “Well if he’s not, I guess I could come back,” he’d replied, to which the woman on the phone answered, “Oh, no—he only sees people when he’s not receptive.”
A long circular driveway, made of two-toned stone pavers, led to the house, a mansion in the Spanish mission style, with decorative wrought-iron bars over the windows and red tiles on the roof, the grounds landscaped in junipers and potted grasses, aloe and century plants, groomed to perfection and currently being attended to by a crew of people wearing red jumpsuits, clipping and raking and weeding and sweeping, though DeLuca didn’t see any landscapers’ trucks in the driveway. He parked behind a Toyota Prius with a decal on the rear window that said “Starfleet Academy.” The only other car was a white Rolls-Royce, polished and detailed to perfection. The snow that had fallen the night before, leaving eighteen inches in Colorado but only a dusting in Albuquerque, had already melted, the sun bright overhead in a cloudless sky.
There was a large open-air porch and a set of carved wooden doors, the knocker a brass angel. After a moment, DeLuca was met by a young woman, also in a red jumpsuit but with an apron over it, her smile beaming, if that was the word, and from what he’d read about the Brethren of the Light, it was.
“I’m David DeLuca,” he said. “Here to see Brother Antonionus.”
“I’m God’s Miracle,” she said. “Welcome welcome welcome. I’m pretty sure he’s unavailable right now but you’re welcome to wait. Do you like cinnamon rolls? There should be some hot out of the oven in a few minutes. With pecans or without?”
“With,” he said. “When you say unavailable…”
“I mean he’s receptive,” she said. DeLuca must have had a puzzled expression on his face. “He’s receiving instructions. The downloads usually don’t take all that long.” He suspected she didn’t mean that Brother Antonionus was online. “Would you like a cup of coffee or tea? Or would you like to focus for a few minutes while you wait?”
“Focus?” he said.
“Good Attentions,” she said (though it was possible he hadn’t heard her correctly), pointing to what probably would have been a large dining room, in a normal house, converted here into a computer room where he saw two people, in red jumpsuits, wearing what looked like bicycle helmets with wires coming out the back, staring at computer screens. “There’s a pod open if you want it.”
“I’m good,” he said. “Thank you.”
He took a seat in a leather chair, one of two facing a large fireplace where a small warming fire burned. God’s Miracle took a sprig of sage from a large basket and tossed it on the fire before returning to her kitchen duties. On the coffee table between the chairs were a few magazines, including UFOlogy Today, Extra-Terrestrial Journal, Maxi-Brain, and Redbook. He picked up a copy of Maxi-Brain where, just inside the cover, he found a full-page advertisement for AlphaWare, with a picture of its president and spokesperson, Brother Antonionus, wearing a beatific smile, his eyes twinkling behind his round wire-rimmed glasses. The products being offered included serenity-inducing audiotapes of ocean waves and loons oodling in the twilight; a Good Attentions software kit (“The road to heaven is indeed paved with Good Attentions…”) with a bicycle helmet wired to a black box that could interface with a Mac or PC, technology proven to help children and adults with attention deficit disorder; an Optico-Aural Stimulator that looked something like a jet pilot’s helmet with flashing/blinking lights inside and multiphasing white noise lavations guaranteed to deliver deep-relaxing alpha-wave brain activity; and finally a room Ionic Aromatizer that could project a variety of therapeutic fragrances, with a set of free refills if you ordered now. There was a Website with a full catalogue of other products as well.
DeLuca reviewed what he knew of Brother Antonionus, based on what Dan Sykes had managed to dig up and e-mail him the night before. He’d been born Malcolm Percy, in Milwaukee, in 1944, ordained as an Episcopal minister in 1968 but asked to leave the ministry after falling under the influence of Dr. John C. Lilly, whose early work studying dolphin intelligence had led him down a path that ended with his taking hallucinogens and sitting in sensory deprivation tanks for days at a time, a practice Reverend Malcolm Percy had recommended to his congregation. After being homeless for the better part of the seventies, with a few arrests up and down the West Coast for disorderly conduct, credit card fraud, and shoplifting here and there, Malcolm Percy had resurfaced as Brother Antonionus, founder of a company called Maxi-Brain that sold home sensory deprivation tanks and other bliss-generating mechanical devices, all intended to deliver “natural” highs by artificially inducing the autonomic release of pleasure-producing organic chemicals such as endorphins, adrenaline, and dopamine, though according to Dan Sykes, most people who used Maxi-Brain devices were usually stoned or tripping on something else first. Brother Antonionus had opened a chain of Maxi-Brain Spas across the country where people who couldn’t afford to own his equipment could stop in for a brain tune-up, selling franchises to true believers at a time when the New Age movement was at its peak. As far as Dan Sykes could learn, Antonionus still owned a controlling share in the spa business, though most of them had shifted away from the brain-machine business and into massages and acupuncture, and he owned a business called AlphaWare that produced the devices, software, and educational tapes and DVDs DeLuca had seen advertised in the magazine, but somewhere in the 1990s, Antonionus’s focus had shifted to leading a group of people who believed UFOs were going to come and carry them away, to heaven or outer space or another planet, Sykes couldn’t be certain, “The Next Condition,” they called it. Dan’s e-mail had said:
In a nutshell, Percy has managed to convince his followers (100+?) that he’s from another planet and that the body he now occupies is just a shell he has to wear, like a deep-sea diver’s dive suit, and that if his followers do what he says (which includes giving him all their worldly possessions), they can shed their own bodies and transcend this ol’ world. He says all the ideas he gets for brain machines and whatever were sent to him by his home planet, Rigel, I believe. Funny—he doesn’t look Rigelian. It’s mostly old technology that he repackages, but he’s got some tech connections somewhere, to be sure. Now they go out into the desert and hold “Ascensions” and wait for UFOs with signal fires/drums/chanting, etc., based on Revelations 11:12, “Then they heard a loud voice from heaven saying to them, ‘Come up hither.’ And in the sight of their foes, they went up to heaven in a cloud.”
One report I read, written by someone who dropped out of the program, said he’s been spiking the punch at his “Ascensions” with Viagra and Ecstasy, then the Maxi-Brain goggles produce maxiboners and the party turns into an orgy (theologically speaking, a kind of Adamism, meaning an effort to return to the innocence of a pre-lapsarian Garden of Eden when sex was guilt-free and plentiful—or so they say). This might explain why no one is disappointed when the UFOs don’t show up. But this is unconfirmed. Good luck. Keep your nose clean. Dan.
After about ten minutes, a young man in a red jumpsuit asked DeLuca to follow him. Brother Antonionus was seated at a glass-topped table with a Macintosh G5 on one corner and a cordless telephone at the other. Six crystals were arranged in an arc on the table directly in front of him, the largest the size of a banana. The walls of the room were painted white and empty of all adornment, with a matched pair of floor lamps in the far corners, bracketing the table. The man seated at the table was also dressed in a red jumpsuit, though his had quilted padding sewn into it that made him resemble a racetrack pit-crew member
in fire-retardant coveralls, minus the sponsor decals. He also wore a white turtleneck that, with his bald head, made him look something like a light bulb in a socket, lacking only the lampshade to complete the image.
“You’re David DeLuca,” the man said. “I’m Brother Antonionus. How can I help you? You’re with the Air Force, is that right?”
“Army,” DeLuca said, showing Malcolm Percy his badge and credentials. “Counterintelligence. Thank you for giving me a few minutes of your time—I gather you have a pretty full schedule.”
“I’m due to receive my midmorning reports in a few minutes, but I think I can squeeze you in,” he said.
“Reports from whom?”
“From all my waiters and waitresses,” he said. “That’s a bit of an in-joke, but that’s what we call ourselves because we’re all waiting. You must be busy, too.”
“I’m looking for a girl who seems to be missing,” he said. “My information says she apparently called you, because you called back and left a message on her machine.”
“And her name is?”
“Cheryl Escavedo,” DeLuca said. “Sergeant Cheryl Escavedo. Arizona Army National Guard.”
Brother Antonionus tapped a few keys on his keyboard, reading from his monitor.
“She called here… February seventeenth. Would that make sense?”
She’d disappeared on the nineteenth.
“Does it say there what she might have called about?” DeLuca asked.
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